Jacques-Emile Sunday

Jacques-Emile Sontag, 1910

Jacques-Emile Sontag (born June 6, 1869 in Dinsheim , † July 31 (27), 1918 in Urmia ) was the Latin Archbishop of Isfahan with his seat in Urmia.

The son of François Xavier Sontag (1824–1899) and Marie Anne Bering came from a large Catholic farming family in Alsace, who moved to France after it joined Germany. In 1883 he joined the Lazarists and received his high school and seminary training in the Gard and in Paris. He was ordained a priest on June 8, 1895 and initially served in Urmia. In 1897 he took over the management of the Lazarist branch in Tehran. After François Lesné's death , Sontag was appointed Apostolic Delegate in Iran and Latin Archbishop of Isfahan and was ordained episcopal on August 28, 1910 in Paris. Like his predecessor, he settled in Urmia, near the Catholic Christian Center of Salamas .

There he experienced the armed conflicts between Russians, Turks, Kurds and Assyro-Chaldeans in the following years . In July 1918 Turkish and Kurdish troops occupied Urmia. Sontag refused to hand over the mission station and cathedral that served as refugee accommodation to marauding Kurds. When they were forcibly appropriated, he, three other priests and hundreds of refugees were shot, then the Christian population of Urmia were killed, kidnapped or forced to flee.

The initiated beatification process was not successfully completed.

literature

• Joseph Eyler: Monseigneur Sontag, Martyr en Perse . Lanoux, Mutzig 1996. 164 pp.